The Tavern

The skill menu has been completely rewritten in 0.8. New features are:

Aptitudes are always displayed.
You can press * to view all skills.
Crosstrain bonus and antitrain malus are displayed as aptitude bonus/malus.
You can navigate the menu with a cursor. It is disabled by default. Just press enter or a directional key (arrow or numpad) to enable it.
When toggling a skill with enter, the cursor automatically move to the next skill. This allows you to quicky toggle several consecutive skills.

Tiles

Mouse support for selecting skills and pushing the buttons at the bottom.
Skill icons (thanks to Denzi for drawing them!). You need a window height of at least 702 pixels. You can disable them by setting the tile_menu_icons option to false.

Transfer knowledge. This is the last ability of Ashenzari, the new cursed god. It allows you to transfer skill points from one skill to another. The interface is integrated in the new skill menu. The transfer isn't instantaneous, points are transferred each time you gain XP.

Preview: when selecting a skill as the source or destination of the transfer, the new level at which it will be raised or lowered is displayed.
Transfer progress: During the transfer, the skill menu will show the transfer progress by default. You can change view with "!".

Love it? Hate it? Have any comment or suggestion? This is the place!

Galehar

Honestly, I think this is too cluttered to my liking. I prefer the current Skill Menu.
And the style of the icons is not consistent with the style of the spell and item icons.

New stuff is only icons and aptitudes. Icons can be turned off with tile_menu_icons. If some people wants to disable only skill icons, I could add an option for that, but we're trying to reduce the number of options, so I'd rather not. However, I'll probably disable the display of aptitudes at least for tutorial and hints mode. So again, if it's requested, an option could be added for that in regular game.

Also, if you've formed this opinion just be looking at the screenshot, you should understand that I've made it trying to show many features. In a real game, it's sparser at the beginning, and only becomes cluttered when you're character has progressed and learned many skills. By that time, you should have gotten used to it.

Yes, I realize that in a real game the screen would look much different.
Just off the top of my head, what if the cross/anti skills highlighting and the bonus/malus numbers are not displayed by default, but when you press * ?

I like those Icons, they look cool. And let's see how the cluttering turns out in a real game. My dad (65 years) will surely be a good candidate to let you know if it's understandable

One thing - could the the text beside the icons be centered vertically? Aligning them to the top of the icon looks a bit off.

Getting rid of modality in the m screen is worth showing two numbers for each skill (aptitude and progress) for each skill.

Perhaps it would reduce the visual clutter if the aptitudes for dimmed (Lvl 0 or training reduced) skills were also dimmed. That would make it easier to skim for the information you care about.

As it stands that bright magenta -4 next to Earth Magic keeps drawing my eye.

I very much like those icons. Props to Denzi for drawing them. Marc's suggestion to dim the aptitudes for dimmed skills would definitely be nice, though I don't find it terrible as-is.

The new icon thing is pretty neat, but will wait to see if it becomes to cluttered. One thing that I have noticed so far is that when I go into the skills menu with 'm', i can fiddle with my skills and whatnot but when I hit enter to leave the menu with the changes made, it instead deselects the skill i currently have highlighted. Not a problem, just threw me off for a second.

Level 0 skills are not shown by default. They are only if you press *. If you do so, it's probably to check aptitudes, as it is the only information displayed for level 0 skills. So no reason to dim them.

Keys to interact with the menu are arrows, numpad (only 2,4,6,8), enter and letters from 'a' to whatever is the letter of the last selectable skill. To exit the menu, just press any other key (so not enter). I usually use escape.

Done

I don't know if this is new or not, but I really like the ability to see other skills and get a sense of progress on training new skills like fighting or spellcasting. It's very frustrating when you have no idea how much longer that will take.

Progress of level 0 skill isn't shown.

I'm pretty sure it is in 0.8 - press m, *, and you'll see something like Fighting 0 (20%).

I like it.

The new skill menu is a big improvement - it's amazing just how much DCSS continues to improve. Galehar, you're doing good work.

In that case, it's because CDO hasn't updated to that version yet. It was an unintentional change and was fixed in trunk as soon as we realized it.

I think danr is playing tiles. But not the latest version as you have explained.

I like it.

One minor problem I have, though (and I'm not even sure whether this is new) is that pressing a key that doesn't correspond to a skill the character has will exit the skill menu.

It speaks for itself, i don't play 0.7 anymore because of the new menu (and armor), good job

Looks good to me.

More clarity for user interface = always good.